In various communications systems, e.g., some CDMA systems, different users may use different uplink transmission rates. For a base station to recover a signal corresponding to an individual user, the appropriate level of despreading should be applied, e.g., an amount of despreading corresponding to the data rate of the users uplink channel.
A base station normally needs to be able to support communications with a number of users at the same time. As a result, a base station normally has to be able to perform different amounts of despreading for different users.
In many cases, the base station needs to be able to address the possibility that any one of the users may operate at the highest possible uplink rate.
While despreading may be done by simply configuring together, e.g., under software control, the minimum number of elements needed to implement despreading for an individual user based on the user's data rate, the ability to support such dynamic configuration adds complexity. Thus, while in such a dynamic implementation intended to minimize the number of hardware elements the number of elements used to perform despreading operations may be decreased as compared to some other embodiments, the level of control complexity associated with supporting such a dynamic level of configuration adds considerable complexity to controlling and configuring the device. Furthermore, given that device, e.g., base station, may need to be able to support high despreading rates for multiple users at the same time, such dynamic configuration may actually result in little hardware savings since many despreading elements which are required to enable support of high despreading rates are likely to go unused when users requiring low despreading rates are being supported.
In view of the above, it should be appreciated that it would be desirable if methods and/or apparatus could be developed which would allow for relatively simple control and little or no need to reconfigure hardware modules to support multiple despreading rates for multiple users.